Steed on A Banana Peel

By RICHARD CORLISS

Critics long ago stopped even pretending they had any effect on the moviegoing habits of the mass audience. So to be forbidden an early peek at a film, as we were last week with The Avengers, is to be momentarily flattered that we matter. Hiding a film--especially a big-budget action-adventure with a certain pedigree--is a studio's open signal that the picture smells. It is a mystery how moguls think they can tell an epochally awful movie from a routinely bad one; last year, for example, there were plenty of press previews for The Saint, to name just one other dyspeptic update of a '60s British TV spy series. And one wonders why a studio would advertise its low opinion of a film, in effect encouraging journalists' pans. Well, we critics are an agreeable lot. So here goes.

The TV show, which was created by Sydney Newman (Doctor Who), ran in Britain from 1961 to 1969, and in the U.S. from 1966 to 1969. It starred Patrick Macnee, an actor of dumplingy face and no fixed appeal, as John Steed, infallible British agent with a Pierre Cardin wardrobe and a lethal umbrella. His most notable partner (of three) was Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, a jump-suited vision of protofeminist swank; she could handle a quip, a karate kick and power tools with equal authority. Each week they saved the world from suave nasties and gave viewers a cozy thrill or two.

Now Steed is played by Ralph Fiennes, an actor of such autocratic reticence that director Jeremiah Chechik and writer Don MacPherson must have thought it'd be fun to embarrass him at every turn. So there he is, naked, reading a newspaper and muttering feeble double entendres, as he first meets Mrs. Peel.

She is now Uma Thurman, who has a figure for high boots and miniskirts, but who affects an imperious mid-Atlantic accent that strives to recall the early Bette Davis. The thin smiles of the leads are meant to lend insouciance to the sub-Bondian dialogue. Or perhaps they are simply suppressing an impotent scream. We need only watch The Avengers for its endless 90 minutes. They had to be there daily, inuring themselves to dismay.

The plot could have been pertinent; it is about a powerful madman, Sir August de Wynter (Sean Connery) seizing control of the weather. But MacPherson botches even this. Instead of global warming, we get global cooling: London in a wedding-cake snow storm. (Exasperated note to filmmakers: London always has lousy weather. You may as well threaten Angelenos with smog.) Connery never connects with his role, but part of the problem is that The Avengers has the sloppiest dubbing since The Jazz Singer; Connery's lips move a macrosecond before we hear the words. The cast also includes a host of theater royals: Jim Broadbent, Eileen Atkins, John Wood, Fiona Shaw. May they have earned enough from their ordeal to buy estates in Majorca.

Some bad movies are bold outrages; many others become hits. This one hasn't the juice to be either. It is an inert gas. Chechik doesn't attain even the workmanlike facility of the old show's directors; if he were to take the pseudonym Alan Smithee, the name directors affix to movies they're ashamed of, he'd be boasting. And The Avengers is that most depressing and disposable of movie failures: the anonymous atrocity.

--R.C.